Day: April 11, 2018

Wagner James Au of the long-running blog New World Notes has been following the development of an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) called Worlds Adrift, which he calls “the single-shard, open world sandbox MMO with physics, a working ecosystem, and user-generated content — i.e., a virtual world worthy of the term — running on the well-funded backbone of Improbable“.

Once again, Strawberry Singh is right on top of Second Life events with a very timely blogpost on a matter of concern to all Second Life users, especially the fashionistas! She is to be commended for providing such a crucial service to the SL community.

The issue? E2V, one of the popular vendor systems used in many in-world stores in Second Life, has announced that they are retiring their product at the end of May. (I first heard the news this morning from Sansar/Second Life creator Debi Baskerville.) You might think that this will not affect you, but if you have bought products from any of the following well-known Second Life brands/stores, you are affected:

Maitreya

Belleza

Slink

Catwa

7 Deadly S{k}ins

The Skinnery

Glam Affair

Tableau Vivant

Cynful

Just BECAUSE

Dead Dollz

Tres Blah

ISON

Kaithleen’s

EMPIRE

Exile

Apple May Designs

Ingenue

etc., etc…

What to do? First, don’t panic; vendors have several weeks to make an orderly switchover to a new in-world vendor system. Strawberry has the following excellent advice for consumers:

Check Credit – Go to those stores and check if you have any leftover credit before May 31st. You might want to then also use that credit or contact the creator and ask if they are planning to transfer the credit to any new vendor system.

Redeem Gift Cards – If you have any left over gift cards in your inventory from any of these stores and you haven’t redeemed them yet, make sure to do so before May 31st.

Get Redeliveries – Redeliver anything that you may need.

The part about getting redeliveries is important, especially if you have a mesh head from Catwa or a mesh body from one of the “Big Three”: Maitreya, Belleza or Slink.

Also, since so many of you have Catwa brand Bento mesh heads, there is news that Catwa has a self-hosted E2V server and will not be impacted by this change. They say:

Regarding the sad news about E2V vending system that they will be retiring. Maybe some of you are wondering what will happen to his CATWA redelivery history and credits balance. We have good news. Since CATWA has a Self-hosted system. It will not be effected. Our redelivery and credits system will keep going. If there will be any other changes I will let you know.

However, since E2V is ending all support for the product after the end of May, eventually they, too, will have figure out a way to move all their customers to another vendor system.

NeosVR bills itself on its website as a “Virtual and Mixed Reality Multiverse Engine”. According to the Road to VR article:

In its latest update, named the ‘User Friendly Update’, the alpha version saw a new mechanic that allows you to interlink individual worlds, represented as tiny orbs. The “world orb” also has a 360 thumbnail and number beside it to indicate how many users are within it. This essentially allows you to build several interlinked, multiuser spaces filled with objects of all types, so you could make your own art gallery, photogrammetry-based tour through a physical place; almost anything you can imagine using NeosVR’s toolset.

There’s not a lot of pictures or video of NeosVR content yet, aside from a 10-second video clip of an experience within NeosVR:

There’s also an 8-minute time-lapse video showing the building of several experiences:

They do have a mailing list that you can sign up for on their website, to become a beta tester for the software. NeosVR is currently in alpha, and they warn that “forward content compatibility isn’t guaranteed in an Alpha build and there are various features missing.” (That’s a quote from the confirmation email I got back when I registered.)